Cluster Map

June 23, 2005

The Suicide Bomber, Narcissism, and the Ego Ideal: Part II

Yesterday I wrote about the young woman from Gaza who attempted to keep her hospital appointment in Israel and thank the Israelis for treating her burns, suffered in a kitchen fire, by blowing herself up and killing as many innocent people as possible.

[Today, Roger Simon (coincidentally) was kind enough to post a sequence of pictures of the woman at the Israeli border crossing where her plans were discovered.]

I suggested that her culture, by glorifying the suicide bomber had created a situation in which young people with less than the usual self esteem could easily adopt the identity as an idealized suicide bomber as a way to enhance their sense of themselves as a valuable member of society.

Today I want to draw attention to a second story from last week. This is an excerpt from an interview with a Syrian historian and author Dr. Georgette 'Attiyya, translated by MEMRI TV:

Dr. Attiyya: The Palestinian woman's womb is a factory for the conflict; it produces fighting children. After this fighting child is produced, he is taught: "This is your land, this is your country, you will fight for it, stand on it, and die for it." Therefore, a very important connection exists between motherhood, land, and blood.

Keeping in mind that in Palestinian parlance, "fighting children" are those who kill other children and innocents, this suggests that the ego ideal of the young Palestinian is formed in a milieu that includes the glorification and idealization of the "martyr" who gives his or her life for his or her people.

It is easy to see how a young adult who has limited prospects (in the case of al Biss, her burns left her disfigured and a poor prospect for marriage, her only way to have a position and function in her society) will seize upon the glory of martyrdom to construct an ego ideal which can be used to augment and repair their damaged self esteem.

During development, the young child's sense of his self worth forms in response to his mother's emotional responses. As Heinz Kohut once put it, the child looks for, and the lucky child receives, the "gleam in his mother's eye." The mother's delight in her child gives him the feeling of being treasured by another human being; this is the foundation stone for all future development along the line of normal, healthy narcissism. The feeling of being loved and treasured by the most important person in his world never leaves the child, though it is overlaid with reality in the following years. One point to note is that this reaction by the mother implies that the she has the capacity to see her child as an increasingly independent person who will have his own desires and wishes, not identical with her desires. When the 2 year old says "No!", despite the difficulty, a sensitive parent recognizes the importance of the milestone. The child is declaring their independence; their desires no longer match the mother's desires all the time. They are separate and have made the first step toward becoming an independent person. When a parent reacts with anger or rage or anxiety to such steps, rather than taking delight in their young charges newly discovered independence, the child is left too fearful to take further independent steps. Their development is stunted by the need to please their parent. In a culture that treat children as if they are objects to be used for the greater good of the society, which idealizes and glorifies the suicide murderer, children have very few options for constructing a healthy ego ideal.

What we would consider the most wonderful of opportunities for our children, that they would wish to go to school and do well, perhaps to graduate or professional school, or into the military, or into some other productive field of endeavor, where they can make a life for themselves, a family, perhaps to give us grandchildren one day, are options that in Palestinian culture are relatively devalued. In Palestine, the suicide bomber is the one who has his or her picture in the papers, posted on walls throughout Palestine, glorified in their death, not in their life.

[Our culture's glorification of celebrity has its own pathological elements which I have discussed elsewhere, but it is in no way comparable to analogize the celebrity-hood of Madonna with the suicide bomber.]

Dr. Attiyya's point about the value of the Palestinian woman and the Palestinian child is applicable to much of Islamic fundamentalist and fascist thought.

Islamic fundamentalists have made very similar comments about the Islamization of Europe. Their position is that the women in Islam is a vehicle for producing more and more Islamic warriors until such time as they can overwhelm the decadent Westerners demographically and bring Shariah law to Europe; the child is a vehicle for battling for the greater glory of Islam.

Golda Meir once said, "there will never be peace until the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate ours."

How will the Islamists ever learn to love their children when they proudly proclaim, "we love death and you love life"?

The unspoken question that hovers over our entire war effort is how much of this belief system is inseparable from Islam and how much of this belongs to a small minority.

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The Suicide Bomber, Narcissism, and the Ego Ideal: Part II

Yesterday I wrote about the young woman from Gaza who attempted to keep her hospital appointment in Israel and thank the Israelis for treating her burns, suffered in a kitchen fire, by blowing herself up and killing as many innocent people as possible.

[Today, Roger Simon (coincidentally) was kind enough to post a sequence of pictures of the woman at the Israeli border crossing where her plans were discovered.]

I suggested that her culture, by glorifying the suicide bomber had created a situation in which young people with less than the usual self esteem could easily adopt the identity as an idealized suicide bomber as a way to enhance their sense of themselves as a valuable member of society.

Today I want to draw attention to a second story from last week. This is an excerpt from an interview with a Syrian historian and author Dr. Georgette 'Attiyya, translated by MEMRI TV:

Dr. Attiyya: The Palestinian woman's womb is a factory for the conflict; it produces fighting children. After this fighting child is produced, he is taught: "This is your land, this is your country, you will fight for it, stand on it, and die for it." Therefore, a very important connection exists between motherhood, land, and blood.

Keeping in mind that in Palestinian parlance, "fighting children" are those who kill other children and innocents, this suggests that the ego ideal of the young Palestinian is formed in a milieu that includes the glorification and idealization of the "martyr" who gives his or her life for his or her people.